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I'm ALex,
FOUNDER OF HUMAN AT THE HELM.

Hi, I'm Alex Honeysett. I’m a former corporate PR Director turned Brand and Marketing Strategist and founder of Human at the Helm. 

For the first ten years of my career, I led communications strategies for several global, high-profile companies in finance, media and education. I cut my teeth running thought leadership events with former British Prime Ministers, pitching executives at Davos and SxSW, drafting op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, navigating complex crisis communications issues and landing coverage in publications and broadcast outlets from the New York Times to CNBC.

It was exciting, fast-paced, and heady. Until it wasn’t. Towards the end of my corporate career, I was sitting at my desk one afternoon reviewing an executive messaging document and thinking, “What the hell does this even mean?” 

The work, as was true for many PR teams at the time, centered around reputation management and how we were going to be perceived vs. what we actually wanted to say.

Which meant we weren’t saying—or standing for—very much of anything.

In 2016, I left corporate to see if I could use my communication and PR powers to create more good. I wanted to work with people and brands who wanted to use their platforms to take a stand on something, especially those pushing for equality, sustainability, more intentional and self-aware leadership and values-driven work. I also wanted the space to dig into the two questions that have always fascinated me: Who are we at work vs. in our personal lives? What does that intersection of career, business and life look like for each of us?

The result is Human at the Helm.
 
By focusing on the people that sit behind the brand, we’ve helped grow more than 50 businesses and personal brands that mean something to the communities they serve and to the people doing the work. Which, it turns out, is the most magnetic marketing tool there is. 



"This place could be beautiful, right?
You could make this place beautiful." 

- Maggie Smith, Good Bones

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Human at the Helm is a resource hub for founders and corporate professionals looking for human-centric business-building and personal branding tools. 

What You’ll Find:

• Brand messaging and marketing strategy sessions to tackle your unique business-building challenges and get you clarity, quickly

• Half and full-day content days to get your highest-priority content drafted, from LinkedIn bios to blog articles 

• A personal branding program to help you identify your unique leadership qualities and build a meaningful thought leadership platform

• Guides, templates and articles to support the growth of your business and personal brand in the Resource Library 

My mission at Human at the Helm is to help more purpose-driven business owners and corporate professionals promote their work, meaningfully.

Alex Honeysett is a seasoned Brand & Marketing Strategist with 15 years of experience leading communication and marketing campaigns for corporations and small businesses in media, education, finance, fintech, professional services, healthcare, wellness, interior design and more. She is the founder of Human at the Helm, a strategy and resource hub for new business owners, and Helm Strategies, a thought leadership consulting firm for small and mid-sized businesses.

Alex believes the key to successful business-building and personal branding is not mastering the marketing platform of the week but understanding the heart-beating humans you exist to serve and communicating that understanding back to them.

Prior to launching her consulting business, Alex was the Director of Communications at Channel One News (acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and NASDAQ. She was also Content Lead at HD Made and PR Manager at Reuters, working out of both their New York and London offices.

Alex has helped dozens of executives and business owners identify their brand purpose and drive growth through tailored, human-centric PR and marketing strategies. She has landed executives guest blogs and op-eds in leading national and trade publications including Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Inc.com and Wall Street Journal; speaking gigs at conferences around the world including SxSW, Emerging Women, CHRO Leadership Summit, and more; and media coverage in print and broadcast outlets including the Today Show, Mashable, BBC, NPR, and CNN. Her own articles have been featured in The Muse, Forbes, Inc.com, Mashable, DailyWorth, TIME and Newsweek.

Alex is a mentor for the Women's Enterprise Development Center, a certified CultureTalk partner and a Founding Advisor of Purposeful Communications.

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Brand Values

Everything you’ll find here at Human at the Helm is driven by five guiding values:

01/

Business is about people

Beneath KPIs, quarterly earnings, marketing campaigns, job promotions and book tours is people talking to people. Which means it’s critical to get the people part right. The strategies I share here are rooted in the basics of human behavior and connection.

02/

WE'RE HERE TO SERVE

Our primary responsibility as business owners and corporate professionals is to create change through our work. Sometimes, it’s easy to get lost thinking about how our businesses and personal brands serve us. When in doubt, we come back to two questions: How can I help? Where can this work make the biggest impact? 

03/

Transparency, trust and purpose

Purpose and transparency drive trust, and trust drives everything else. No business or business leader in 2022 is viable without them. Also, there’s a misconception that profit and purpose are at odds with one another; but purpose-driven businesses are actually 3x more profitable.

04/

Fluidity over mastery

They key to successful business-building and personal branding is not mastering LinkedIn or Instagram. Instead, it's knowing how to stay nimble—how to listen, create, iterate, try new things, find what works, drop what doesn’t and keep going.

05/

Lack of funding, smaller loan sizes and the U.S. childcare crisis have led to female-run businesses generating roughly half of the revenue of their male counterparts. BIPOC-owned businesses were the hardest hit by the pandemic, with Black-owned businesses declining 41%. Of the 31 million small businesses in the U.S., only approximately 1100 are LGBT-certified. HatH is committed to raising awareness, donating and partnering with women, BIPOC and LGBTQ-run organizations to change these statistics for the better. 

Interested in working together?

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Founder, Follow the Fear

Lisa Pertoso

"Alex is a true collaborator who sees the big picture of your small business."

"She helped me better understand the why behind my work by bringing reflection questions and exercises, and then crafted my brand messaging to feel authentic. Working with Alex was a creative and fun partnership that left me feeling reenergized to lead my company. "